The emergent field of information aesthetics combines a rich variety of technical and artistic disciplines. Designers and new media artists are joining scientific visualization, informatics, and medical imaging specialists to create purposive, predictive, and creative representations of information. SIGGRAPH 2009 is highlighting this field in recognition of the increasingly prominent role that information visualization and data graphics are assuming in our digitally mediated culture.

The Information Aesthetics Showcase includes 2D and 3D prints, interactive and presentational screen-based works, multimodal installation environments, and physical objects that reveal information. In keeping with this year's theme, Networking the Senses, the works shown here engage not only the visual, but also auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile modalities. The relationship to information expressed in these exemplary pieces ranges from straightforward visualization of data to fanciful re-invention and transformation of it. Presenters include computational journalists, visual and material artists, biological researchers and neuro-scientists, graphic designers, scientific visualization developers, historians, cultural theorists, and digital media center collaborators.